What is an ischool?

Many people ask me this question when I told them I would pursue my graduate study in IST at Penn State. And many people cannot tell the difference between ischool and computer science department. Even last week, one undergrad asked me "why do you study information? Information is always changing and it's meaningless and impossible to study it!!!"

So, back to the theme. What is an information school?
To answer this question, we should first define what is information. Information is based on data but they are not same concept. Data is the collection of observation or experience. It has no meaning without context. However, when we give meanings to data, in other word, put data in a context, it becomes information. For example, given a 10*5 matrix of numbers, people cannot understand what each cell means. But if we know each row is the final scores of one student and each column stands for different courses, then we have the information about the exam results of these ten students.

Generally speaking, Ischool studies information science.

Information science is an interdisciplinary science concerned with the collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information.
Tracing back to the early age of information science, the focus of it is to dealing with the management of libraries and archives. With the development of electronic and automatic devices since 1950's, the subject gradually transit into the modern information science.
Nowadays, information science includes many kinds of topics such as data modeling, groupware, document management, human-computer interaction, information architecture, information systems, knowledge management and so forth. It has been acknowledged as a new subject and many universities have founded their special information school for the research in this area.
As for research, Information science has similar methods to computer sciences and social sciences which including archival research, computational complexity and structure, content analysis, case study, historical method, interviews, life history, longitudinal study, observation and participant observation.

For most ischool that I know, they share some characteristics in common. One point is that they are all doing research in the interdisciplinary areas. They do not barely focus on technical, pschological or some other particular subjects. As I have mentioned before, we should provide context to information. In Graph Theory, we have the concept of 'betweeness'. I think the betweeness of ischool is very high since it relates departments that seldom cooperate.
However, every ischool has different taste. For IST at Penn State, it focus more on social informatics. We have quite many sociologial researchers here. My friend studies information science in Arizona, I think ischool there pay more attention to Artificial Intelligence and some related area. They have very strong faculty doing research of AI. For ischool at CMU, I found it is more related to management and business. They have mroe research in e-commerce, information management, and enterprise informatics. What's more, their master program in management information system is a very good professional program that can help students secure a good job after graduation.

Ok, back to the reason why I come to IST at Penn State.
From my undergraduate study, which is in Software Engineering, I found that I can do technical stuff well, like programming. But I am more interested in the interdisiplinary area of technology and other subjects. I like to think and analyze problems. Such as how can we design a better user interface? How people interact with machines? How can we assess the value of our information asset? These questions seem very attractive for me. Then I realized, I need a degree from ishool but not computer science.
Second reason is that the research in IST is very diverse. Therer are many areas in IST that I am very interested in when I was browsing the information of IST. Including security informatics(Dr.Chu, Dr. Liu, Dr. Squicciarini, Dr. Mcgill), HCI(Dr.Carroll, Dr.Rosson) and web search(Dr. Jansen and Dr. Giles).
Some other reasons that I choose Penn State is that I like the northeastern part of the States since there are Boston, NYC, DC and Philadaphia here. And my girlfriend is in CMU which is only 3 hours drive from here.
All the reasons together made me here in IST at Penn State. I am very happy that I met many helpful and insightful faculty and many interesting students here. And I do believe I'll enjoy my time here.